James Shepherd Pike was a journalist from New York City before the Civil War – a staunch antislavery man and ardent abolitionist who wrote for Horace Greeley’s liberal New York Tribune in the 1850s.  During the Reconstruction, he put his journalistic skills to work documenting the progress of Reconstruction.  He traveled to South Carolina, one of the few southern state legislatures where African Americans constituted a notable political force.  Curiously, his pre-war sympathies transformed completely, and he became a staunch supporter of White rule in the South.  Published as The Prostrate State in 1874, his account of Black participation in the South Carolina state legislature was not so much the cause of his conversion to White supremacy so much as evidence that it has already been completed. His account served as the basis for later racist diatribes such as Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905) and the film The Birth of a Nation (1915).

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Yesterday, about 4 p.m., the assembled wisdom of the State . . . issued forth from the State-House.  About three-quarters of the crowd belonged to the African race.  They were of every hue, from the light octoroon to the deep black. . . .

Let us approach nearer and take a closer view.  We will enter the [South Carolina] House of Representatives. . . .  The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal-black.  At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costume, visages, attitudes, and expression, only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer.  It must be remembered, also, that these men, with not more than half a dozen exceptions, have been themselves slaves, and that their ancestors were slaves for generations. . . .  

One of the things that first strike a casual observer in this negro assembly is the fluency of debate, if the endless chatter that goes on there can be dignified with this term. . . .  Sambo can talk on these topics and those of a kindred character, and their endless ramifications, day in and day out. . . .  The negro is imitative in the extreme.  He can copy like a parrot or a monkey. . . .  His misuse of language in his imitations is at times ludicrous beyond measure. . . .

Here, then, is the outcome, the ripe, perfected fruit of the boasted civilization of the South after two hundred years of experience.  A white community that had gradually risen from small beginnings till it grew into wealth, culture, and refinement, and became accomplished in all the arts of civilization. . . .  It lies prostrate in the dust, ruled over by this strange conglomerate, gathered from the ranks of its own servile population.  It is the spectacle of a society turned bottom-side up. . . .  It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master and putting that master under his feet. . . .  Does anybody suppose that such a condition of things as exists to-day in South Carolina is to last?

Source: James S. Pike, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1874), 9-21, 58-65.

Document 4.15.12: Excerpts from The Prostrate State by James Shepherd Pike, 1874.